OP-Ed: Why would anyone oppose voter ID law?

With Pennsylvania’s voter ID law approaching its two-year anniversary, will any registered voter have a credible argument for having not obtained an approved ID by next fall?

Melowese Richardson was an enthusiastic voter. She was also a poll worker in her native Ohio. This past summer, Ms. Richardson was sentenced to a five-year term in prison for voter fraud. What was her undoing? Her own words. She proudly admitted to having cast multiple ballots for her preferred candidates in the same election cycle thus leading officials to a review of signatures. This incident and others validated the suspicions of international poll observers, who had been invited by those concerned with voter suppression to monitor our 2012 elections. In their estimation, our fraud prevention controls did not meet “third world standards.” In the case of Ms. Richardson, the only control was self-incrimination.

What happened in Ohio is not an isolated example. Virginia and Minnesota have long histories of felon registration and voting. In Colorado, it is non-citizens – by the thousands. Elected officials in New York have a knack for tampering with absentee ballots while, in Missouri, “get out the vote” volunteers have exhibited a remarkable facility for registering both the dead and individuals who had never lived. Our own Philadelphia can lay claim to an election for the state legislature which was deemed by the courts to be so contaminated with tainted ballots that the result was invalidated.

Assertions by many that voter fraud is minimal presume, via self-serving logic, that relatively low rates of apprehension correlate to low levels of fraud. An analogous circumstance which would counter such thinking can be observed daily in the 40 mph construction zone of Route 422. Drivers routinely exceed the speed limit on this hazardous stretch of roadway with a rather high degree of certainty that they will not be cited. In much the same fashion that a photo/radar system would reduce speeding in this bumper car zone, a photo ID for purposes of securing an absentee ballot or entering a voting booth would reduce fraud.

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For those who have inferred that what voter fraud may exist does not carry consequences, there is Florida in 2000 and Minnesota in 2008. While the ballot fiasco in the Sunshine State and questions about the legitimacy of the George W. Bush win are well known, the circumstances surrounding the 2008 senatorial election in Minnesota are not. When the polls closed that election night, Republican incumbent Norm Coleman led by mere hundreds of votes over his Democrat opponent, Al Franken. Franken was ultimately declared the winner by a razor thin margin (312 ballots) and provided the vote necessary in the U.S. Senate to pass the Affordable Care Act. Was that result, in a state known for voting irregularities, contaminated by fraud? We will never know due to a lack of the most effective of fraud prevention protocols.

Despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2008 which determined that state-legislated voter ID laws did not impart an undue burden to voters, energized interest groups, primarily from Pennsylvania’s urban centers, conducted an effective campaign to delay the implementation of our state’s ID law, galvanizing voter turnout in the process. In this endeavor, they were assisted by a Republican dullard, state Rep. Mike Turzai, who famously declared that the law’s passage would deliver Pennsylvania to Mitt Romney.

With a state court system known more for political machinations than judicial acumen, it remains to be seen when the voter ID implementation date will be set or if further adjudication will take place. Those who successfully delayed the law’s implementation in 2012 should however be wary of overplaying their hand in 2014. To do so, more than two years later, without having demonstrated any discernible effort to increase the voter ID rolls, would expose an end game far less concerned with the integrity of the ballot than a tipping of political scales.